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The time has come...

post #1 of 12
11/16/06 at 12:29am
Thread Starter 
Well I ordered a few new plugins, and until people learn to compile in 64 bit, or better yet open their source ala LADSPA plugs, it appears I am heading back to a 32 bit install, kinda a shame on my nice opteron workstation. Oh well. Yea for more random thoughts, will probably be tackling this one this weekend at the latest(When my new plugs come in)

Seablade
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post #2 of 12
11/16/06 at 1:25am
I assume these are audio plugins? Can you be a little more specific? I'm still on the same Dapper64 install from 2 weeks before the official release. Dealing with i386 only software has only been an annoyance for me, as some things actually take some effort to get working. Fortunately, There's nothing I have not been able to get working. Curious to see where you hit a wall.
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post #3 of 12
11/16/06 at 1:40pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
I assume these are audio plugins? Can you be a little more specific? I'm still on the same Dapper64 install from 2 weeks before the official release. Dealing with i386 only software has only been an annoyance for me, as some things actually take some effort to get working. Fortunately, There's nothing I have not been able to get working. Curious to see where you hit a wall.
It isn't that I wasn't able to get sometyhing, working, it was how I had to get it working... What I was referring to were VST plugs, specificly Kontakt and SoundSoap are the new ones I have coming in, though I will be ordering more when I am not quite so poor(I have a few others that need iLok thus negating its use on Linux entirely) Problem is you can't load a 32 Bit process into a 64 Bit host, without a LOT of work on the programming end, if it is possible at all. So what this means is that in order to load 32Bit VSTs into Ardour, Ardour has to be 32Bit, which means in order for it to work with Jack, Jack has to be 32 Bit, meaning any other audio software I want to work with Jack needs to be 32 Bit. Considering this is first and foremost an audio workstation, that is most of the software on it. Thus there is little reason for me to stick with 64 bit for the moment. There are a few other programs I run on occasion(3D- Blender specificly with the video rendering in it, and other video software) that would benefit from 64 Bit, but the key word on that is on occasion. My living comes from audio. So until they start making those blasted VSTs in 64 Bit, I am stuck with a 32 Bit environment. Seablade
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post #4 of 12
11/16/06 at 2:11pm
I have an Asus A8JS with the Core Duo 7200. I went the Dapper 64 way but got snagged by Flash and the Nvidia proprietary driver. I just could not get them to work, so I went back to Linux Mint 32bit (Ubuntu Dapper with audio and video codecs pre-installed).

Alex
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post #5 of 12
11/16/06 at 2:16pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by adewolf
I have an Asus A8JS with the Core Duo 7200. I went the Dapper 64 way but got snagged by Flash and the Nvidia proprietary driver. I just could not get them to work, so I went back to Linux Mint 32bit (Ubuntu Dapper with audio and video codecs pre-installed).

Alex

Well for the next time, that one is easy enough to fix for you

The NVidia drivers are 64 Bit compatible, I can tell you that much for certain as I run them myself and have for quite some time.

The Flash plugin, while they are working on a 64 Bit version, there are 32Bit versions that will run fine on AMD64 at least with the emulation libraries installed as the processor is backwards compatible with 32 Bit code. I believe Core 2 Duos are as well but am not positive on that. At any rate if you run the Firefox(Or whatever browser) with the 32 Bit code, you can load in the the 32 Bit Plugins as well, which includes Flash. Note the GNash does compile in 64 Bit so that is also an option.

The same basic concept is there for MPlayer as well, getting a 32 Bit Binary shouldn't be to difficult and would allow you to use the win32codecs if you wanted. Personally I am finding myself not really needing those codecs at all.

Seablade
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post #6 of 12
11/16/06 at 6:09pm
adewolf, what seablade said. You can goto www.getautomatix.com and get all of those things working in one shot.

Seablade, one huge issue I have with Blender is that it seems to one use one core on my system. Why is the rendering not multithreaded? The most cpu usage I get is like 65%. 3dsmax, on the other hand, hits 100% for all my renders. I tried rendering some scenes from the Elephant's Dream... it never went over 65% and I could tell my system was not being taxed very much.
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post #7 of 12
11/16/06 at 7:26pm
Thread Starter 
Don't know, haven't tried multicore renders with it, will have to give that a shot sometime and see whats up. Actually... quick google...
Quote:
Threads enables multi-threaded rendering; great for multi-core and multi-processor systems.
So it should be able to, you might want to check how it was compiled, I suspect threads might need to be enabled during compilation as well. Seablade
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post #8 of 12
11/16/06 at 8:13pm
I run SUSE 10.1 64bit on my 4-way SFF (2x275 Opterons). I simply installed 32bit firefox and installed 32-bit versions of other multimedia programs and w32codecs. Everything works fine for me. Just fyi.
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post #9 of 12
11/16/06 at 8:16pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by cjcox
I run SUSE 10.1 64bit on my 4-way SFF (2x275 Opterons). I simply installed 32bit firefox and installed 32-bit versions of other multimedia programs and w32codecs. Everything works fine for me. Just fyi.

Yep for day to day things that aren't interrelated it works very well.

Unfortunatly it doesn't work so well for audio as everything is interrelated for that for me Means its an all or nothing there.

Seablade
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post #10 of 12
11/16/06 at 10:23pm
Thread Starter 
So I was waiting for the stage3 to download, and ran across a few interesting articles. Since I had already wiped my drive I unfortunatly couldn't test it out first, But I suppose I will test it first, and then switch to straight 32 bit.

The basic premise of it is to use the bashrc file in portage to add CFLAGs on a per package basis. Why this isn't in portage itself yet I don't know but it seems like a really good idea. At any rate, the thing I am not sure is a good idea or not, is going to be to add the -m32 or -m64 on a per package basis, starting with my audio software as mentioned above that would need to be 32 bit all the way through to work. I don't really want to deal with a 32 Bit chroot to be honest, but that would allow me to keep things like Blender or Cinelerra, or whatever in 64 Bit as much as I wanted, assuming it works.

My thought process is since i will be installing the emul libraries anyways, running the 32 bit native using them might not be a bad idea. We will see if it works I suppose.

Seablade
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post #11 of 12
11/17/06 at 12:37am
I don't mean to derail this thread but is 64bit really worth the effort?

Alex
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post #12 of 12
11/17/06 at 1:48am
Thread Starter 
Well to me yes.

The thing is I have one major thing that gets in the way.

Truthfully what used to be the downsides of it really are going away very quickly, most programs that are still developed at all can compile in 64 Bit. You won't notice much of a difference between 32 and 64 Bit though except generally on multimedia intensive things, think video encoding, some audio, POVRAY renders apparently, etc.

There will be a slight, to insignificant, boost on everyday tools for most people, office software and browsers. But if you do transcoding or anything of that nature you will notice the difference there most likely.

For most people these days, it is more of a question of why not? instead of why? The extra effort for most things is minimal(For example the situations with mplayer or flash about, the extra effort is typing 4 extra characters on Gentoo emerge mozilla-firefox-bin instead of mozilla-firefox) and it certainly doesn't hurt in most cases.

Seablade
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